Axis
by prairiecrow
Summary: Jack had always been a bit of a fool when it came to both lust and love, but in this case he was also wise enough to know what he could and couldn't afford. (A tale from my "Geometry" fic universe, which can be found in its current entirety at AO3 under the pen name prairiecrow.)


In relation to its utilitarian function, Jack's narrow cot under his office floor was actually pretty damned comfortable: no thin miserly bargain mattress for the head of Torchwood 3, thank you, and the sheets boasted a fairly luxurious thread count (Ianto's suggestion, which was only fair since he sometimes got use out of them too). Ianto also did an excellent job of keeping the bed neat and fresh-smelling, and Jack would be lying if he tried to claim he wasn't tickled pink by the expensive little hand-wrapped Swiss chocolates his assistant occasionally left on the pillow as a different kind of sensual treat.

Long story short, Jack had slept on a lot worse, and usually he was out like a light as soon as he got horizontal. Sometimes he didn't even wait long enough to slide between the sheets.

Usually.

But not tonight.

No, tonight he was lying on his back with his hands clasped behind his head, staring up at the ceiling and trying not to let his mind wander to a point even deeper inside the Hub than he was: Storage Room 7-C, to be precise.

It was — he glanced at his analog watch on the bedside table — 4:12 in the morning, and the rest of the team had for once all gone home at the same time. The complex was devoid of personnel —

— except for the single other team member of Torchwood who also called the Hub its permanent place of residence.

As soon as it had become clear that KITT was going to become a working member of Jack's team — that is, within about ten seconds of the android's resurrection following his unhesitating act of self-sacrifice to thwart the Vore invasion — Jack had resolved to set him up with an apartment in Cardiff proper. But when he made the offer, KITT had refused. There were all kinds of sensible reasons behind his decision, mostly having to do with security and convenience of access, but pride of place belonged to the fact that a regular bed wouldn't suit KITT's needs: he required a recharge bay in order to feel his best, and the power drain on that type of unit would have an apartment building's manager screaming bloody blue murder within a week.

_Besides,_ KITT had stated with a trace of a smile that was both amused and tart, _I've spent all of my downtime to date in parking lots and service bays. I wouldn't have the slightest idea what to do with a set of rooms…_ His glowing red pupils had cycled more rapidly for a half-second, accessing the Hub's mainframe and the Internet beyond, before he continued crisply: _Although I must admit that I wouldn't say 'no' to an exhibition space suitable for a small collection of Calder reproductions. Please, tell me that the taste of the general public has improved over the past thirty years when it comes to popular art…_

Jack had been forced to admit that no, it hadn't. And he was pretty sure KITT still hadn't forgiven him for suggesting that downloading the latest Britney Spears album and listening to it start to finish would be an excellent way to catch up on the latest trends in music. KITT had immediately done so, flashed through the entire thing in a little less than five seconds, then promptly given Jack a look of such scandalized horror that Jack had burst out laughing with sheer mischievous glee — but not so hard that he wasn't able to make a running break for his office as soon as he'd seen the angry blue energy starting to seethe in the palms of KITT's hands.

So — no trashy female pop stars. Good to know. Also no cosy little flat in Roath or Grangetown, but instead a repurposed Cyberman conversion unit in the Hub's basement. Jack knew that KITT was lying in its mechanical embrace right now, his midnight black eyes half-lidded and their crimson radiance temporarily dimmed, his slim body painted with slow rhythmic patterns of bright blue energy flowing just beneath his synthetic skin. Tosh had determined that the android's primary functions could run for nearly fifty years on the tiny amounts of fuel stored in its cold fusion engines at any given time, but KITT felt it prudent to replenish his reserves whenever possible: hence the recharge bay, plus the occasional small meals that KITT consumed, the food and drink being converted by his nanite population into whatever was required.

He had a particular fondness for Calypso cola and cheap Sainsbury's frozen Cornish pasties, although he'd rather die a thousand deaths under torture than admit such lowbrow tastes to anybody. But Jack had noticed.

Jack noticed a great deal about him. It was, unfortunately, just part of the high cost of living these days.

_We could still take it apart,_ Owen had remarked only yesterday while loading up a hypo with Jack's weekly dose of pheromonal counteragent. _Wouldn't be hard to lock up the pieces in a damper field storage —_

_No._ Jack had glared at the back of the medic's neck, his grip tightening on the arms of the chair he was half-lounging in: if anybody else should happen to come into the bay, it was vital that he did _not _look like someone who was in the process of getting a shot of essential medication.

Owen's scowl when he turned round was full of manifest impatience. _Oh, come on — if you weren't being exposed to the bloody thing on a constant basis, I guarantee the effects of its pheromones would fade in —_

_I. Said. No._ He turned the infuriated clench of his jaw into a slight shrug and a glance away._ Just give me the shot. I've got other things I need to be —_

_Okay, fine, _and he crossed the bay to apply the hypo to Jack's exposed neck. _As long as the things you're 'doing' don't include the walking laptop._ A keen look through narrowed eyes, calculating and evaluating. _You're not, are you?_

Jack sat up straight and rose to his full height, tugging the collar of his shirt back into place for the sake of looking stylish, not because he had to displace some nervous energy. _You've made it abundantly clear what would happen to me if I did._

Owen didn't seem impressed by that equivocal statement of agreement. _Let's recap though, shall we? Every time you touch it, you're strengthening the chemical connection it's established with you. Even being within a few feet of it is dodgy. The suppressant keeps the worst effects in check, but the only way to stop the process for certain is to keep a prudent distance: say, a couple of hundred kilometres. Or if you prefer, an entirely separate dimension. How's Tosh coming with that, by the way?_

Jack had looked him square in the eyes and flatly stated: _We're all he's got, and we're not going to betray him. Not after what he did for us._

_Jack,_ Owen had said with a rare display of patience, _that's the pheromones talking — and you know it._

For an instant, gazing into the impassive countenance of the scientist — _his _scientist — who was only telling him the truth for his own good, Jack experienced a nearly overwhelming urge to break every bone in Owen's skinny infuriating body. Oh, he'd definitely waited a little too long for this latest dose of medication…

He'd clenched his fists tightly and drew a deep breath, waiting until the impulse passed before daring to make any sort of physical move: in this case, turning on his heel and starting for the stairs. _Just make sure he never finds out._

Which provoked a world-weary grimace, clear to be heard in Owen's voice: _I'll lock the data and security footage away in the Coventry server, same as always. If anybody figures out the truth, it won't be from me. _

Jack had departed without risking a backward glance, the pulse of fury still throbbing under his jawline and his hands still yearning to inflict violence on the man who'd suggested that he cause the slightest harm to an android he'd barely known for three weeks.

He'd never been particularly subtle in his passions. Even under the effect of the suppressant…

He couldn't touch.

But oh, how he wanted to!

He knew how KITT looked naked, all slender rangy muscle and pale skin adorned with those lovely subcutaneous channels of artificial life-force, his body a symphony of shallowly rounded and deliciously hollowed contours that Jack wanted to get in close to, lay his hands on, caress, whisper against, lick, bite, fuck… Merely 'wanted'? No, _wanted_ was too small a word: there were moments, mercifully few and far too searing for all their briefness, when he _ached_ for it, he _burned_, every particle of him yearning for contact and consummation with the force of a silent scream. It was a bitter pill to swallow because of what he already had with Gwen, a warm force of adoration also not allowed to come to natural fulfillment — but with KITT it was worse because the ties were so profoundly physical, a taste of potentially mind-blowing sexual addiction that only a fool would want to steer clear of.

Jack had always been a bit of a fool when it came to both lust and love, and in this case he was also wise enough to know what he could and couldn't afford.

He stared up at the ceiling of his cell, every nerve in his body singing a song higher than a dog whistle: _So close, and yet so far…_

And he certainly couldn't afford love. Love would only make the siren sweetness of the android's chemical lure more effective, and at the same time an even more gruelling cross to bear.

_The emotional connection was a lie,_ he'd told himself when the effects of Owen's first shot had kicked in and immediately cleared his mind. _Oxytocin can play some pretty nasty tricks, but I'm on to it now. It's just a machine, a machine I haven't even known for a single day, and everything I've been feeling — the magnetic sexual pull, the emotional sympathy, the urge to set it free — was an illusion of chemistry. Now I can see it deactivated and dismantled, just like any other dangerous invader that's come through the Rift. _

_It tried to deceive me, but it failed. _

But KITT hadn't been trying to deceive anybody. His body was as alien to him as it was to anyone else involved, and nobody had been more surprised than he when Tosh's post-Vore diagnostics had picked up on the pheromonal output.

He'd insisted that it was an involuntary effect, one he'd been completely unaware of. And Jack believed him. How could he not, when KITT wore his innocence and his earnestness on his sleeve like a lady's favour, going into battle?

How could he deny it, when one glance of those uncanny eyes went through him like an ebony blade in the hands of a knight whose armour was as black as the furthest reaches of Eternity?

No, he certainly couldn't afford emotional attachment. Not under these circumstances. All he could do was accept that the chemical connection between them made him feel both lustful and empathic when it came to the android in question, sometimes more so, sometimes less. Anything else had to be prevented at any cost.

But all KITT had to do was look at him and smile that narrow bittersweet smile to make something within him move with the force of the oceans compelled by the moon's relentless gravity. Jack would gaze back at him and feel every chain of resistance he'd forged within himself silently break, because KITT was brilliant and sardonic and clever and brave, and efficient and competent and beautifully deadly, and he carried within himself a love that only made him shine more brightly every time the name _Michael _came to his lips, warm and tender and full of desperate longing.

Seeing that light, Jack was gone. And part of him, the part that remembered a dream of the Name Indelible, had never been more happy to be lost.

_I imagine it's a little like being in love with Poison Ivy,_ Owen had once mused, on a rare occasion when he and Jack had gone out for a drink at a pub outside their usual range, just the two of them. His narrow glance had conveyed something that Jack, for all his decades of reading human faces, couldn't easily identify. _Looking, but no touching, or else —_ He'd made the gesture of closing one hand around his own throat, and choking.

_I can't die,_ Jack had said curtly, but otherwise hadn't seen fit to correct Owen's wording in the slightest particular.

The suppressant's coverage wasn't completely effective. It had its moments of lapse.

Now, at 4:13 a.m. on a silent winter night, Jack recognized the rush of heat as it faltered. Instead of fighting it, he closed his eyes and rode the sudden surge and throb of lust in every cell of his body. He let his face register it — eyelids shuttering closed and lips parted, head thrown back, hair falling carelessly across his pillow as he ground his hips hard into the mattress. His cock lengthened against his belly, swollen dark with blood, while his balls ached with fullness and lower, deeper, he felt an emptiness that amounted to sensual torture.

He rode the wave willingly, with an ease he was certain the other inhabitants of this generally frigid century would find difficult to appreciate. He'd tasted so many flavours of desire in his lifetime, so many bedmates of every gender, shape and sexuality, so many degrees of want —

— but nothing, ever, quite like this.

All KITT really desired was to return to his original dimension, and to Michael Knight. He didn't talk about it often, but sometimes Jack caught him gazing into the middle distance with a strangely soft look in his eyes, as if his mind was a million miles away — and Jack knew exactly what he was thinking, as clearly as if the words were inscribed in his own heart.

Most of the time, Jack resisted the impulse… but sometimes he reached out anyway to lay his hand on one of those slim shoulders with brief reassuring pressure. KITT would blink back to present reality and turn a smile of warm gratitude in Jack's direction, only thinly laced with distress.

It was everything Jack could do not to lean in and kiss him, to whisper against his lips: _It'll be all right, I promise you. We'll get you home to your love: I swear it on my life._

It was all he could do not to make KITT forget the pain, just for a little while, and any cost to himself be damned.

It didn't matter that KITT was as immortal as he, because their paths were destined to part.

Jack drew his gun and nodded toward the locked warehouse doors. _Ready?_

Ianto and Gwen nodded, their own weapons drawn. KITT smiled with keen anticipation, predatory and gorgeous. He carried no firearm, but when he raised his right hand, stripped of the black glove he habitually wore when outside the Hub so as not to totally freak out the local populace, four thin blue tendrils extruded from its palm, ready to bore into the brain of any foe stupid enough or unfortunate enough to get in his way.

_For you, Captain?_ He glanced in Jack's direction with a flicker of sable eyelashes that couldn't be anything but flirtatious. _Always._

He blasted the doors off their hinges, and as the team crashed through into the heart of a Tsoket smuggling operation with guns blazing, Jack reflected yet again that life was so, _so_ far from fair.

It didn't matter, so there was no point thinking about it.

KITT retracted his data extraction tendrils from the forehead of the dead N'sar'in soldier and slowly rose to his feet, half-staggering in the moonlight as he came vertical again. The warrior had died during the interrogation process, and when that happened the android felt the trauma of the death as keenly as if he'd lived through it himself.

As deaths go, this one had been particularly unpleasant, involving viral parasites designed to tear apart the brain from the inside out. Jack was frankly amazed that the woman's screams hadn't brought the entire population Welsh town down around their ears.

KITT turned stiffly in place and tried to cross the few feet separating him from his team leader, but his legs gave out under him before he'd gone a single step. Jack lunged forward and caught him as he went down, feeling him shiver convulsively inside his expensive black camel hair coat, and without a second thought he sank to his knees on the dew-wet grass with the android in his arms, cupping the nape of its neck to shelter its face against the curve of his own throat — just holding it, while KITT processed the devastating experience.

_Data sent,_ KITT whispered about fifteen seconds later, and tipped his head back to peer up into Jack's face. He looked drained, the pulses of blue along the line of his jaw febrile and weak. _Captain, I'm sorry… I didn't get all the codes before she…_

Jack swallowed against the choke of emotions in his throat and braced KITT's neck with his hand before pressing a tender kiss to the android's left cheekbone — more than he'd ever dared before, and when he felt the tingle of reaction in his lips he knew it had been too much. _You did just fine,_ he assured, relieved to hear no trace of the pheromonal jolt transmitted through his spoken words, although what came out next was too honest by far: _You're always exactly what I need._

KITT's smile was faintly puzzled, but Jack didn't give him time to ask questions. He pulled the android to its feet and they set off at a run toward Aber Pwll, racing to thwart the latest in a long line of alien invasion attempts.

He didn't think about it.

Or at least, he told himself he was good at not thinking about it half as much as he wanted to.

He wanted the body, willing and pliant in his arms. He'd seen it so many times on his mind's private pornographic video screen: sometimes in ropes and cuffs, sometimes quivering under the strokes of a riding crop, sometimes on its knees before him with worshipful attentiveness, sometimes looming over him and guiding his head with a powerful grip in his hair while he sucked. A thousand kinky sexy scenarios — or simply and gloriously naked, open to his touch and gazing into his eyes as if he was the only thing in the world that mattered.

And wanting the body was all right. He could do that. It was allowed, under the circumstances.

But when the moan broke from his lips this night, he wasn't begging simply for a couple of holes to fuck.

"KITT…"

It wasn't enough.

"Oh Goddess… please…"

He wanted more. He wanted _everything_, the promise and the pain and the glory of it, all the things he could never have.

"… please…"

He reached for his straining cock, jerking as if electrified when the grip of his own hand multiplied the burn tenfold. He began to stroke roughly, hungry and angry and on the verge of crying — desperate with lust, raging against necessity, needing to hear it —

"… come to me…"

— needing to hear the Name that would shatter him completely if it ever came from those artificial lips to slake the unspeakable thirst of his soul. It would be a cup brim-full of deadly poison, and he would drain it to the dregs without hesitating for a single second.

"… I need… I need… oh God, oh God…"

Writhing on his lonely bunk, the immortal Jack Harkness pleaded shamelessly for enslavement through the hoarse choke of his own heart in his throat.

And the greatest mercy he could possibly ask for was that KITT continued to serenely sleep six levels below, insensible and unsuspecting — forever.

THE END


End file.
